Archbishop Oscar Romero

Archbishop Oscar Romero

How arid we human beings are when the Holy Spirit is not in us! How cruel people become when animated not by God’s Spirit but by the spirit of getting along in the World! It pains my heart deeply to know how our people are tortured, how the rights of God’s image are trampled. That should not be. Without God, humans are wild beasts. Without God, they are deserts. Their hearts have no blossoms of love. They are only the perverse persecutors of their brothers and sisters. That is why they are hearts capable of betraying others, informing on them, not caring that they are led away to be tortured and killed.

To be a Christian now means to have the courage to preach the true teaching of Christ and not be afraid of it, not be silent out of fear and preach something easy that won’t cause problems. To be a Christian in this hour means to have the courage that the Holy Spirit gives in the Sacrament of Confirmation, to be valiant soldiers of Christ the King, to make his teaching prevail, to reach hearts and proclaim to them the courage that one must have to defend God’s law.

— The Violence of Love Dec 4 1977

With Christ, God has injected himself into history. With the birth of Christ, God’s reign is now inaugurated in human time.

On this night, as every year for twenty centuries, we recall that God’s reign is now in this World and that Christ has inaugurated the fullness of time. His birth attests that God is now marching with us in history, that we do not go alone.

Humans long for peace, for justice, for a reign of divine law, for something holy, for what is far from earth’s realities. We can have such hope, not because we ourselves are able to construct the realm of happiness that God’s holy words proclaim, but because the builder of a reign of justice, of love, and of peace is already in the midst of us.

Let us not be disheartened, even when the horizon of history grows dim and closes in, as though human realities made impossible the accomplishment of God’s plans. God makes use even of human errors, even of human sins, so as to make rise over the darkness what Isaiah spoke of. One day prophets will sing not only the return from Babylon but our full liberation. “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light. They walk in lands of shadows, but a light has shone forth.” 